It’s strange to think that the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent the world into lockdown seven years ago never ended. It continues to kill and cripple us, to this day. We simply stopped talking about it. Despite all the death and those forced to live their lives crippled by the after effects of the disease, the media (and I’m just as guilty of this as anyone at The New York Times) and our governments decided to move on to new things—or at least ones that bleed in a sexy way that draws the eye. We—and I mean the world—didn’t have enough ventilators or beds. Corpses floated down rivers in India. Bodies were stacked like sandbags in the back of freezer trucks as morgues overflowed. Doctors and nurses died in the same wards as the patients, days before, whom they had been struggling to save.
It’s hard to rekindle the fear and uncertainty I know I felt back then. I was worried sick for my little chosen family. I recall driving the parkways and ring road around Calgary, Canada, after dusk during the lockdown. Normally, the city, fast-growing and full of entitled drivers hungry to get home, was a sea of high-beam lights and road-stained metal. That evening, the roads were ours alone. For a moment, I thought it was funny that my phone shuffled to “Ghost Town” by the Specials. That moment passed quickly. It’s so easy to forget the terrible things we survived when faced by new terrors that we don’t yet know how to navigate. We don’t much talk about it, but the state of the pandemic right now is… well, not great.
…the United States facing the 12th major wave of infections. Conservative estimates place cumulative COVID deaths in the United States at over 1.2 million, while excess-mortality analyses indicate a substantially higher toll. Globally, excess-mortality modeling places the true pandemic death toll in the tens of millions, with central estimates near 27 million worldwide, far exceeding official counts. Transmission continues at high rates—presently at roughly 1 million infections per day, with more than 240 million infections recorded in 2025 alone. Reinfections are widespread, and Long COVID remains a mass disabling condition affecting millions.
When I lie awake at night, and the intrusive thoughts in my rotation recede for long enough to hear other musings, I wonder how we can ever hope to take care of one another when we have so quickly been entirely convinced not take care of ourselves.
Previously:
• New study suggests Long COVID is now most common childhood chronic health problem
• A terrific primer on all things Long Covid
• New study reveals that almost 1 in 4 adults who had COVID also developed long COVID symptoms